Scripps Faculty Books

Lynching in the West: 1850–1935

Ken Gonzales-Day — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 14:51:18 PDT

Accounts of lynching in the United States have primarily focused on violence against African Americans in the South. Ken Gonzales-Day reveals racially motivated lynching as a more widespread practice. His research uncovered 350 instances of lynching that occurred in the state of California between 1850 and 1935. The majority were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity. An artist and writer, Gonzales-Day began this study by photographing lynching sites in order to document the absences and empty spaces that are emblematic of the forgotten history of lynching in the West. Drawing on newspaper articles, periodicals, court records, historical photographs, and souvenir postcards, he attempted to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings that had occurred in the spaces he was photographing. The result is an unprecedented textual and visual record of a largely unacknowledged manifestation of racial violence in the United States. Including sixteen color illustrations, Lynching in the West juxtaposes Gonzales-Day’s evocative contemporary photographs of lynching sites with dozens of historical images. Gonzales-Day examines California’s history of lynching in relation to the spectrum of extra-legal vigilantism common during the nineteenth century—from vigilante committees to lynch mobs—and in relation to race-based theories of criminality. He explores the role of visual culture as well, reflecting on lynching as spectacle and the development of lynching photography. Seeking to explain why the history of lynching in the West has been obscured until now, Gonzales-Day points to popular misconceptions of frontier justice as race-neutral and to the role of the anti-lynching movement in shaping the historical record of lynching in the United States.

Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change

Gayle Greene — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:29:55 PDT

Doris Lessing has been a chronicler of our age for nearly half a century, and a study of her writing career does not yield easy generalizations. Difficult though she is to categorize, she is always concerned with change, with a search for "something new" against "the nightmare repetition" of history. The feminist quest she articulated in The Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook entered the culture with the force of a new myth: these books changed lives. The Golden Notebook--together with such works as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique--raised the consciousness of a generation of women readers and played a major part in making the second wave of feminism. It is the power of Lessing's novels to change people's lives, the effect she had raising the consciousness of a generation of women and the effect she continues to have on young readers, that is the subject of this book.

The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation

Gayle Greene — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:17:17 PDT

This biography illuminates the life and achievements of the remarkable woman scientist who revolutionized the concept of radiation risk. In the 1950s Alice Stewart began research that led to her discovery that fetal X rays double a child's risk of developing cancer. Two decades later, when she was in her seventies, she again astounded the scientific world with a study showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons industry is about twenty times more dangerous than safety regulations permit. This finding put her at the center of the international controversy over radiation risk. The Woman Who Knew Too Much traces Stewart's life and career from her early childhood in Sheffield to her medical education at Cambridge to her research positions at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham.

The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:08:30 PDT

For almost a thousand years language has been an important and contentious issue in Ireland but above all it reflects the great themes of Irish history: colonial, invasion, native resistance, religious and cultural difference. Collected here for the first time are texts on language from the date of the first legislation against the Irish: the Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, to the constitution of the Free State in 1922. Crowley's introduction connects these texts to current debates, giving The Belfast Agreement as a textual example and illustrating that the language debates continue today. Divided into six historical sections with detailed editor's introductions, this unique sourcebook includes familiar cultural texts such as essays and letters by Yeats along side less familiar writings including the Preface to the New Testament in Irish. (1602) Providing direct access to original texts, this is an historical resource book which can be used as a case study in the relations between language and cultural identity.

The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:50:10 PDT

Crowley demythologizes 'standard English' as a marker of uniformity, neutrality, and the one language of truth...One strength of these core chapters is that Crowley positions opposing views/theories in interesting ways in an attempt to offer some balance in prespective...By the end...[he] has successfully woven an historical tapestry of parallel, yet interesting discourses to reveal that every time the question of language surfaces...it means that a series of problems are coming to the fore.

Proper English: Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:50:08 PDT

The texts in this book have been selected to illustrate the process by which particular forms of English usage are erected and validated as correct and standard. At the same time, the texts demonstrate how a certain group of people, and certain sets of cultural practices are privileged as correct, standard and central. Covering a period of 300 years, these writers, who include Locke, Swift, Webster, James, Newbolt and Marenbon, consider the questions of language change and decay, correct and incorrect usage and what to prescribe and proscribe. Reread in the light of recent debates about cultural identity - how is it constructed and maintained? what are its effects? - these texts attempt to demonstrate the formative roles of race, class and gender in the construction of "proper Englishness". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English studies and language and linguistics including discourse theory and the history of language.

Language in History: Theories and Texts

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:50:07 PDT

Using a re-reading of Saussure and Bahktin, the author demonstrates the ways in which language has been used to construct social and cultural identity in Britain and Ireland. For example, he examines the ways in whcih language was employed to construct a bourgeois public sphere in 18th-century England, and he reveals how language is still being used in contemporary Ireland to articulate national and political aspirations. By bringing together linguistic and critical theory, this study provides an agenda for language study; one which acknowledges the fact that writing about history has always been determined by the historical context, and by issues of race, class and gender.

Wars Of Words: The Politics Of Language In Ireland 1537-2004

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:50:06 PDT

Wars of Words is the first comprehensive survey of the politics of language in Ireland during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Challenging received notions, Tony Crowley presents a complex, fascinating, and often surprising history which has suffered greatly in the past from over-simplification. Beginning with Henry VIII's Act for English Order, Habit, and Language (1537) and ending with the Republic of Ireland's Official Languages Act (2003) and the introduction of language rights under the legislation proposed by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (2004), this clear and accessible narrative follows the continuities and discontinuities of Irish history over the past five hundred years. The major issues that have both united and divided Ireland are considered with regard to language, including ethnicity, cultural identity, religion, sovereignty, propriety, purity, memory, and authenticity. But rather than simply presenting the accepted wisdom on many of the language debates, this book re-visits the material and considers previously little-known evidence in order to offer new insights and to contest earlier accounts. The materials range from colonial state papers to the writings of Irish revolutionaries, from the work of Irish priest historians to contemporary loyalist politicians, from Gaelic dictionaries to Ulster-Scots poetry. Wars of Words offers a reading of the crucial role language has played in Ireland's political history. It concludes by arguing that the Belfast Agreement's recognition that languages are 'part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland', will be central to the social development of the Republic and Northern Ireland. The final chapter analyses the way in which contemporary poets have used Gaelic, Hiberno-English, Ulster-English, and Ulster-Scots, as vehicles for the various voices that demand to be heard in the new societies on both sides of the border.

The Language and Cultural Theory Reader

Tony Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:50:05 PDT

This is a core introduction to the most innovative and influential writings to have shaped and defined the relations between language, culture and cultural identity.

The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

Matthew F. Delmont — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:16:00 PST

American Bandstand, one of the most popular television shows ever, broadcast from Philadelphia in the late fifties, a time when that city had become a battleground for civil rights. Counter to host Dick Clark’s claims that he integrated American Bandstand, this book reveals how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination. Matthew F. Delmont brings together major themes in American history—civil rights, rock and roll, television, and the emergence of a youth culture—as he tells how white families around American Bandstand’s studio mobilized to maintain all-white neighborhoods and how local school officials reinforced segregation long after Brown vs. Board of Education. The Nicest Kids in Town powerfully illustrates how national issues and history have their roots in local situations, and how nostalgic representations of the past, like the musical film Hairspray, based on the American Bandstand era, can work as impediments to progress in the present

Insomniac

Gayle Greene — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:48:47 PDT

Gayle Greene offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the devastating and little-understood condition of insomnia. From interviews with neurologists, sleep researchers, doctors, psychotherapists, and insomniacs of all sorts comes an up-to-date account of what is known about insomnia, providing the information every insomniac needs to know to make intelligent choices among medications and therapies. Insomniac is at once a field guide through the hidden terrain inhabited by insomniacs and a book of consolations for anyone who has struggled with this affliction that has long been trivialized and neglected.